The latest beta version of SwiftKey for Android adds one major new feature to this keyboard app: the ability to sync clipboard data between an Android phone and a Windows PC.

When enabled, this will let you copy text on your Android phone and then paste it on your Windows computer with a Windows+V keyboard shortcut. You can also copy text on your PC and paste it on your Android device.

There are a few hoops you need to jump through in order to make sure everything works properly:

  • Install the latest version of SwiftKey on your phone (as of August 3, 2021 you’ll need to use SwiftKey Beta).
  • Sign into SwiftKey on your phone with your Microsoft account.
  • Open the Settings, navigate to “Rich Input” and then select “Clipboard.”
  • Toggle the switch in the app’s Clipboard settings to “Sync clipboard history.”
  • On your PC, make sure you’re signed in with the same Microsoft account.
  • Open the Clipboard Settings menu, and flip the switches to enable “Clipboard history” and “sync across all devices.”

Once those conditions have been met, your clipboard data will be synchronized between devices, although it’ll only be saved for an hour at a time.

Pressing Win+V on a computer will bring up your synchronized clipboard history from your phone and any other devices connected to your Microsoft account that also have clipboard sync enabled.

Copying and pasting from PC to Android is a little more limited – you can only paste the last thing copied to your clipboard, and honestly I haven’t even gotten that to work reliably on my phone.

But theoretically this should allow you to quickly copy a URL, password, or other item from your computer and paste it onto your phone.

SwiftKey is a popular Android keyboard app that’s been around for years, but which was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. So it’s unsurprising to see the company use it as a way to make Android phones and Windows PCs work together a little better.

What’s a little surprising is that it took this long. Microsoft’s Your Phone app for Windows has supported clipboard synchronization for a while, but it only officially supports the Microsoft Surface Duo and a handful of Samsung smartphones. Bringing native Windows clipboard sync to Swiftkey should make the feature available for most devices running Android 5.0 or later.

via xda-developers and Android Police

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4 replies on “SwiftKey lets you sync your Android clipboard with a Windows PC”

  1. Wonder if Swiftkey will work on the Bluestacks 5
    Android emulator running on a Windows PC,
    and later on with Android apps running on
    Windows 11.

    1. …Why?
      First off it’s been possible to share clipboard between the bluestacks VM and windows for almost a decade. Second there’s no way windows 11’s subsystem isn’t going to share clipboard with the apps it opens. The rest of swiftkey’s features are seem to be redundant in either scenario.

  2. I can varmly recommend KDE Connect instead – it does this and much more and is free and open source software without any integrity compromising parts. Has been around for Linux for many years and recently got a Windows version too.

    1. I “highly” recommend Kde Connect or Scrcpy instead of Billy’s prying eyes.
      “… On your PC, make sure you’re signed in with the same Microsoft account…”
      Last windooze I was using is 7 then never turned back. Long live linux/bsd.. Long live freedom coders..

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